Decaying Tuition Room

A single desk sits in the tuition room of Family School Fureai in Yubari, Hokkaido, dust settled across its surface in a layer thick enough to record years of stillness. Paint has peeled from the walls in long strips, exposing the layers beneath. The room holds nothing else. The building was constructed in 1975 as Yubari Municipal Asahi Elementary School, a new reinforced-concrete three-storey structure built on the cleared site of Yubari Daini Elementary School. It consolidated three predecessor schools: Daini, Teibi, and Fukuzumi. Those schools had once held thousands of students between them. Daini alone peaked at 2,827 students across 52 classes in 1952. By the time Asahi Elementary opened, the combined enrolment across all three sites had fallen to 351 students in 13 classes. The coal mines that had sustained Yubari's population of 107,972 at its 1960 census peak were closing one by one. Asahi Elementary closed on 31 March 1983, eight years after opening. The remaining students transferred to the newly formed Yubari Elementary School. The building stood vacant for roughly a decade. In late 1994, Yubari Kanko Kaihatsu Co., Ltd., a third-sector tourism entity established by Yubari City with capital of 30 million yen, converted the former school into Family School Fureai, a public lodging and group training facility. Classrooms were repurposed. The building operated as one of five facilities in the company's portfolio as Yubari attempted to reinvent itself as a tourism destination following the loss of all its coal mines. In June 2006, Yubari City declared its intention to seek fiscal rehabilitation status, having accumulated deficits of approximately 35.3 billion yen. Family School Fureai stopped accepting guests that year. Yubari Kanko Kaihatsu filed for bankruptcy on 2 April 2007 with total debts of 5.46 billion yen. The building was not transferred to the successor operator. It has had no custodian since. By 2016, when this photograph was made, the tuition room held one desk and a silence that the peeling walls have been quietly accumulating ever since.